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The eNaira is supposed to live within a mobile wallet, have the same value and be interchangeable with the physical naira for everyday transactions. Nigerians believe the eNaira, which is governed by a centralized blockchain, is part of the central bank's drive to discourage cryptocurrencies' popularity among Nigeria's youth, just like China's effort with the digital yuan. From a report: And so last week, Nigeria's central bank made two types of eNaira wallets available on Google and Apple stores: one for individuals, and another for merchants. But some users say parts of the wallet for individuals have not worked properly. Fisayo Fosudo, a Nigerian YouTuber who reviews gadgets and apps, said he and three friends initially got error messages that the eNaira app could not match their emails to their bank verification numbers. He would later register successfully but found broken links that did not lead to helpful support pages on the central bank's website. "Was really looking forward to reviewing the eNaira app but it's been hard to get it to work seamlessly. We wait," Fosudo said. After many users left poor reviews for the Android version of the eNaira app for individuals, it was taken down. It had been downloaded 100,000 times before that. The Apple Store version remained available at press time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After months of negotiations, President Joe Biden's Build Back Better agenda advanced into its last phase of debate this week. The bipartisan infrastructure bill contains billions to expand high-speed broadband across the country, aiming to close the digital divide over the next 10 years. From a report: But the administration's $65 billion down payment on broadband can only help connect families who can afford a computer. So Biden's latest version of the Build Back Better program goes further, allocating new funds to bring federally funded desktops, laptops, and tablets to poor Americans. Last week, the White House released its latest version of the Build Back Better plan, outlining a $1.75 trillion budget proposal to tackle climate change and invest in other social services like Medicare. Deep within the over 1,600 pages of the bill is a new initiative -- the Connected Device Grant Program -- that would help provide free or discounted desktops, laptops, or tablets to low-income households. To accomplish that goal, the Commerce Department would receive $475 million to award community groups that want to distribute these devices locally.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes: Chicago Public School (CPS) teachers were 'blindsided' after access to popular classroom software was yanked due to CPS's interpretation of Illinois' Student Online Personal Protection Act (SOPPA), the Chicago Sun-Times reports. Sneha Dey writes, "Among the software products that violate the law, CPS now says, are programs like Code.org, which is widely used in computer science classes, and Adobe applications used for artistic design and newspaper page layouts. That left has many high school newspapers unable to produce their print editions. Also off limits is Scratch, software to create interactive stores, animations and games. CPS had partnered with the Scratch Foundation to hold family coding nights, among other events." The Blueprint's Karen Buecking has more on how the new student data protection law has upended the computer science curriculum at CPS, noting that CPS teachers received an email from tech-backed Code.org explaining the situation: "We've already signed student data protection agreements with over 150 districts across the state to comply with the new law," said the Code.org representative. "The bad news is CPS's agreement and application process contains onerous requirements unrelated to student privacy that make it prohibitive for organizations like Code.org to agree to CPS's requirements as written."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Netflix, the video-streaming giant, began its expected foray into video games with the introduction of five mobile games to its users worldwide, playable initially on Android devices. From a report: The titles are included in a Netflix subscription, and there'll be no advertising or additional purchases required, Mike Verdu, Netflix's vice president of game development, said Tuesday. The streaming company has targeted video games as its next big thing -- it's an industry that's larger than the movie and TV businesses. Players logging in will see a dedicated games row and tab where they can choose which titles to play. Games for Apple's iPhone are also planned. The initial offering includes titles linked to Netflix shows, such as Stranger Things: 1984 and Stranger Things 3: The Game. Also included are Shooting Hoops, Card Blast and Teeter Up.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook plans to shut down its decade-old facial recognition system this month, deleting the face scan data of more than one billion users and effectively eliminating a feature that has fueled privacy concerns, government investigations, a class-action lawsuit and regulatory woes. From a report: Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Meta, Facebook's newly named parent company, said in a blog post on Tuesday that the social network was making the change because of "many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society." He added that the company still saw the software as a powerful tool, but "every new technology brings with it potential for both benefit and concern, and we want to find the right balance." The decision shutters a feature that was introduced in December 2010 so that Facebook users could save time. The facial-recognition software automatically identified people who appeared in users' digital photo albums and suggested users "tag" them all with a click, linking their accounts to the images. Facebook now has built one of the largest repositories of digital photos in the world, partly thanks to this software. Facial-recognition technology, which has advanced in accuracy and power in recent years, has increasingly been the focus of debate because of how it can be misused by governments, law enforcement and companies. In China, authorities use the capabilities to track and control the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority. In the United States, law enforcement has turned to the software to aid policing, leading to fears of overreach and mistaken arrests. Some cities and states have banned or limited the technology to prevent potential abuse.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is bringing back Google Wave, the doomed real-time messaging and collaboration platform Google launched in 2009 and prematurely shuttered in 2010. From a report: Maybe we should've seen this coming. Back in 2019, Microsoft announced the Fluid Framework (not to be confused with the Fluent design system). The idea here was nothing short of trying to re-invent the nature of business documents and how developers build real-time applications. Last year, the company open-sourced Fluid and started building it into a few of its own Office applications. Today, at its Ignite conference, it's launching a whole new product built on top of Fluid: Microsoft Wave Loop. Loop is a new app -- and concept -- that takes the Fluid framework, which provides developers with flexible components to mix and match in order to create real-time editing-based applications, to create a new experience for users to collaborate on documents. In many ways, that was also the promise of Google Wave -- real-time collaboration plus a developer framework and protocol to bring Wave everywhere.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you're worried the metaverse will be all fun and games, fear not: Microsoft is taking its own stab at the idea, and it will have PowerPoint and Excel. From a report: The company is adapting its signature software products to create a more corporate version of the metaverse -- a concept promoted by Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg that promises to let users live, work and play within interconnected virtual worlds. The first offering, a version of Microsoft's Teams chat and conferencing program that features digital avatars, is in testing now and will be available in the first half of 2022. Customers will be able to share Office files and features, like PowerPoint decks, in the virtual world. "This pandemic has made the commercial use cases much more mainstream, even though sometimes the consumer stuff feels like science fiction," Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. Nadella himself has used the technology to visit a Covid-19 ward in a U.K. hospital, a Toyota manufacturing plant and even the international space station, he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yahoo has officially exited China, shutting down all of its services in the communist country as of Monday, Nov. 1. From a report: "In recognition of the increasingly challenging business and legal environment in China, Yahoo's suite of services will no longer be accessible from mainland China as of November 1," a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement. "Yahoo remains committed to the rights of our users and a free and open internet. We thank our users for their support," the rep added. Yahoo's exit from China coincided with the enactment of the country's Personal Information Protection Law, a privacy law that went into effect Nov. 1 that imposes new data-collection restrictions on tech companies, the Wall Street Journal reported.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Zoom is piloting showing ads to users on its free "Basic" tier, the company has announced in a blog post. From a report: Ads will appear on the browser page shown to users at the end of a call. Zoom says ads are being rolled out to free users in "certain countries," though its blog post doesn't detail exactly which these are. Users on the service's Basic tier will only see ads if they join a meeting hosted by another Basic tier user. Although ads won't be shown during meetings themselves, it's still a potentially big shift for the videoconferencing service. Zoom has typically imposed only minor restrictions on its free tier, which helped the service explode in popularity last year as people around the world adapted to working and socializing from home. Even its end-to-end encryption, which Zoom initially said would be limited to paid users, ended up coming to free users after all.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from GeekWire: The Japanese video game company Sega announced Monday that it plans to "explore a strategic alliance" with Microsoft, which will see Sega build new games and overhaul its development process via Microsoft's Azure platform. The new alliance is part of a forward-focused initiative at Sega called "Super Game." According to a news release, Microsoft's Azure provides Sega with a "next-generation development platform" that Sega can customize to account for different styles of work and infrastructural changes."SEGA has played such an iconic role in the gaming industry and has been a tremendous partner over the years," Microsoft CVP Sarah Bond said in a statement. "We look forward to working together as they explore new ways to create unique gaming experiences for the future using Microsoft cloud technologies. Together we will reimagine how games get built, hosted, and operated, with a goal of adding more value to players and Sega alike." According to Sega, the key focuses behind Super Game are the keywords "Global," "Online," "Community," and "IP utilization." With 5G on its way to supercharge cloud gaming in many parts of the world, Sega is explicitly using Microsoft Azure in an attempt to anticipate and serve whatever the next trend might be. The name of the initiative follows up on information spotted in Sega's March 2021 financial presentation, where the company stated that its strategy included the creation of a Super Game within the next five years, defined as a title that "can be expanded globally." With IP utilization as one of the Super Game's hallmarks, it suggests that Sega plans to turn one of its tentpole franchises -- the same financial report mentioned Phantasy Star Online, Sonic the Hedgehog, Persona, Yakuza, and Total War as potential candidates -- to be made into a big-ticket service game. Whatever that ends up being, its development process will be powered by Microsoft Azure.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A U.S. Treasury Department-led regulatory body called on Monday for Congress to regulate issuers of "stablecoins" like banks and urged financial agencies to assess whether the role of these fast-growing digital assets in the country's payments system posed a systemic risk. Reuters reports: The hotly awaited report by the President's Working Group on Financial Markets will likely boost policymakers' efforts to put guardrails around stablecoins, a type of digital asset pegged to traditional currencies which the body said could pose threats to the broader financial system. Stablecoins, which include the likes of Tether, USD Coin and Binance USD, have ballooned 500% to reach a market cap of $127 billion over the past 12 months, according to the report. "The rapid growth of stablecoins increases the urgency of this work," the report stated. "Failure to act risks growth of payment stablecoins without adequate protection for users, the financial system, and the broader economy." While stablecoins are primarily used to facilitate trading in other cryptocurrencies, they could become widely used by households and businesses to make payments, the report said. Currently, though, stablecoins have a wide range of policies governing disclosures, what assets are held in reserve to back the coins, and around redemption rights, all of which could make them susceptible to runs if users lose confidence in the asset. "Runs could spread contagiously from one stablecoin to another, or to other types of financial institutions that are believed to have a similar risk profile. Risks to the broader financial system could rapidly increase as well, especially in the absence of prudential standards," the report warned. Chief among the report's recommendations is for Congress to "urgently" pass a law that would regulate stablecoin issuers akin to insured depository institutions, subjecting them to strict supervision by banking regulators while also providing some form of government backstop in the event of crises.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon plans to launch its first prototype broadband satellites in Q4 2022, which would be nearly four years after SpaceX launched its first prototype Starlink satellites. Ars Technica reports: "This morning, we filed an experimental license application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch, deploy, and operate two prototype satellites for Project Kuiper," Amazon said in a blog post. "These satellites -- KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2 -- are an important step in the development process. They allow us to test the communications and networking technology that will be used in our final satellite design, and help us validate launch operations and mission management procedures that will be used when deploying our full constellation." Amazon said it will launch the satellites from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on ABL Space Systems' RS1 rocket, as part of a multilaunch deal the companies announced today. Amazon's prototype satellites will operate at an altitude of 590 km. "While operating under the experimental license, the KuiperSats will communicate with TT&C [telemetry, tracking, and control] Earth stations in South America, the Asia-Pacific region, and McCulloch, Texas, as well as with customer terminal units and a single gateway Earth station located in McCulloch, Texas," Amazon told the FCC.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Yahoo News: Brazil said it was raising its climate commitments on Monday at the start of the COP26 summit, including ending illegal deforestation by 2028, marking a change of tone after more than two years of soaring destruction under President Jair Bolsonaro. Speaking by live video link, Brazil's Environment minister, Joaquim Pereira Leite, said on Monday the country would cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030, compared with a previous commitment to reduce emissions by 43% over that period. In a plan to meet that target presented by the Environment Ministry, Brazil moved forward by two years its existing commitment to end deforestation by 2030. That trajectory includes cutting deforestation 15% annually between 2022 and 2024, 40% in 2025 and 2026 and 50% in 2027. Deforestation hit a 12-year high in Brazil's Amazon rainforest in 2020, with preliminary government data showing a possible single-digit decline for 2021. [...] Pereira Leite also said Brazil would formalize a commitment to become "climate neutral" by 2050 during COP26, a promise first made by Bolsonaro in April. Brazil announced some ambitious environmental promises, but as CNN points out, the country has a dismal track record. "During Bolsonaro's first year in office, in 2019, deforestation in the Amazon rose 34%. The next year, it rose another 7%, according to INPE, the government agency that monitors deforestation in the country." Some climate activists are "urging delegates at Cop26 not to trust the 'greenwashing' promises of Jair Bolsonaro's government," reports The Guardian. They say the world "should pay more attention to the destructive policies of the recent past than vague promises about the future, which they say are aimed at securing cash." "Nowadays Brazil has an anti-environmental policy," says Suely Vaz, a former head of the environment regulator Ibama who now works for the Climate Obsevatory. "They are paralyzing everything. Deforestation and forest fires are out of control. This must change to ensure that climate money -- which is important for our country -- can be used in very detailed, specified way."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stanford engineers Alex Kolchinski, Alex Gruebele and Max Perham paired up with Michelin-star chef Eric Minnich to start Mezli, a company building fully autonomous modular restaurants. TechCrunch reports: Mezli's prototype robot restaurant is making a minority of the bowls served to customers and is supplemented by a human-powered kitchen. It is up and running and serving customers from the company's KitchenTown location in San Mateo. The machines take up a 10-foot by 20-foot space and are freestanding. They are loaded with ingredients, initially offering Mediterranean-style grain bowls, side dishes and drinks. The bowls start at $6.99. Diners can order directly from the restaurant or order online and pick up the food or have it delivered. The test location is already showing promise: 44% of customers who have tried the food have become repeat customers, Kolchinski said. The company is now working on its third version of its prototype that will be ready for a public launch next year, he said. That momentum is backed by a $3 million seed round from investors including Metaplanet, roboticist Pieter Abbeel, restaurateur Zaid Ayoub and Y Combinator. That new funding will enable the company to add more talent, parts, food and operational expenses. Once the company can scale, Mezli will be able to mass produce thousands of the modular restaurants and deploy them in a fraction of the time and money it takes for traditional restaurants to get up and running, Kolchinski added. "We will be scaling up to a few locations and then mass producing them," he said. "We expect to hit 1,000 locations faster than other restaurants due to our mass production method."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers from the University of Southampton "have developed a fast and energy-efficient laser-writing method for producing high-density nanostructures in silica glass," reports Optica. "These tiny structures can be used for long-term five-dimensional (5D) optical data storage that is more than 10,000 times denser than Blue-Ray optical disc storage technology." ExtremeTech reports: This type of data storage uses three layers of nanoscale dots in a glass disc. The size, orientation, and position (in three dimensions) of the dots gives you the five "dimensions" used to encode data. Researchers say that a 5D disc could remain readable after 13.8 billion years, but it would be surprising if anyone was even around to read them at that point. In the shorter term, 5D optical media could also survive after being heated to 1,000 degrees Celsius. The technique devised by doctoral researcher Yuhao Lei uses a femtosecond laser with a high repetition rate. The process starts with a seeding pulse that creates a nanovoid, but the fast pulse doesn't need to actually write any data. The repeated weak pulses leverage a phenomenon known as near-field enhancement to sculpt the nanostructures in a more gentle way. The researchers evaluated laser pulses at a variety of power levels, finding a level that sped up writing without damaging the silica glass disc. The study reported a maximum data rate of one million voxels per second, but each bit requires several voxels in 5D optical systems. That works out to a data rate of about 230 kilobytes per second. At that point, it becomes feasible to fill one of the discs, which have an estimated capacity of 500TB. It would take about two months to write this much data, after which it cannot be changed. This work is still in the early stages, but the team managed to write and retrieve 5GB of text data using a 5D optical medium. All you need to read the stored data is a microscope and polarizer, and it should be readable for eons. The findings appear in Optica, Optica Publishing Group's journal for high-impact research.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shiba Inu has entered into the top ten most valuable digital assets by market value, "hitting $40 billion and surpassing its cousin and inspiration, Dogecoin," reports Bloomberg. From the report: Shiba was up another 10% at midday on Monday and has doubled in value in the past week. Most of that gain came in a flurry of trading last Wednesday, when it gained a whopping 66%. Even with its recent meteoric rise -- it's up about 900% in the past month -- each Shiba coin costs just a tiny fraction of one cent. If you bought $1,000 worth of Shiba in late September, your 20 million coins would now be worth around $9,000. Shiba's rise is similar to Dogecoin's ascent in the spring, when it caught fire and rose jumped from around 5 cents to 57 cents between April 7 and May 7. Like many other crypto currencies, Shiba is shrouded in mystery. According to its white paper -- or "Woof Paper," in this case -- the token was started in 2020 by an anonymous person or group named "Ryoshi." The paper, which describes how Shiba and its progeny works, is also peppered with soaring-but-vague platitudes about community, freedom, revolution and destroying traditional paradigms. A person with limited background knowledge of technology and blockchain vernacular would be hard pressed to decipher much of the technical wording in the white paper.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Virtually all compilers -- programs that transform human-readable source code into computer-executable machine code -- are vulnerable to an insidious attack in which an adversary can introduce targeted vulnerabilities into any software without being detected," warns cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs in a new report. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt: Researchers with the University of Cambridge discovered a bug that affects most computer code compilers and many software development environments. At issue is a component of the digital text encoding standard Unicode, which allows computers to exchange information regardless of the language used. Unicode currently defines more than 143,000 characters across 154 different language scripts (in addition to many non-script character sets, such as emojis). Specifically, the weakness involves Unicode's bi-directional or "Bidi" algorithm, which handles displaying text that includes mixed scripts with different display orders, such as Arabic -- which is read right to left -- and English (left to right). But computer systems need to have a deterministic way of resolving conflicting directionality in text. Enter the "Bidi override," which can be used to make left-to-right text read right-to-left, and vice versa. "In some scenarios, the default ordering set by the Bidi Algorithm may not be sufficient," the Cambridge researchers wrote. "For these cases, Bidi override control characters enable switching the display ordering of groups of characters." Bidi overrides enable even single-script characters to be displayed in an order different from their logical encoding. As the researchers point out, this fact has previously been exploited to disguise the file extensions of malware disseminated via email. Here's the problem: Most programming languages let you put these Bidi overrides in comments and strings. This is bad because most programming languages allow comments within which all text -- including control characters -- is ignored by compilers and interpreters. Also, it's bad because most programming languages allow string literals that may contain arbitrary characters, including control characters. "So you can use them in source code that appears innocuous to a human reviewer [that] can actually do something nasty," said Ross Anderson, a professor of computer security at Cambridge and co-author of the research. "That's bad news for projects like Linux and Webkit that accept contributions from random people, subject them to manual review, then incorporate them into critical code. This vulnerability is, as far as I know, the first one to affect almost everything." The research paper, which dubbed the vulnerability "Trojan Source," notes that while both comments and strings will have syntax-specific semantics indicating their start and end, these bounds are not respected by Bidi overrides. [...] Anderson said such an attack could be challenging for a human code reviewer to detect, as the rendered source code looks perfectly acceptable. "If the change in logic is subtle enough to go undetected in subsequent testing, an adversary could introduce targeted vulnerabilities without being detected," he said. Equally concerning is that Bidi override characters persist through the copy-and-paste functions on most modern browsers, editors, and operating systems.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ahead of a key city council vote on a $28.5 million water pact with Google, the city of The Dalles filed suit in state court Friday in an effort to keep the tech giant's water use a secret. The Oregonian/OregonLive reports: The city is seeking to overturn a ruling earlier this month from Wasco County's district attorney, who found Google's water use is a public record and ordered The Dalles to provide that information to The Oregonian/OregonLive. The city sued the news organization Friday, asking a judge to intervene. Google is contemplating two new server farms on the site of a former aluminum smelter in The Dalles, where it already has an enormous campus of data centers on its property along the Columbia River. Google says it needs more water to cool its data centers, but neither the company nor the city will say how much more -- only that The Dalles can't meet Google's needs without expanding its water system. The deal calls for Google to pay for the upgrade. Even so, the proposed water pact has attracted scrutiny and skepticism in The Dalles, a riverfront city of about 15,000 approximately 80 miles east of Portland. Residents and nearby farmers are concerned about the city's water long-term water supply amid an ongoing drought. They complain they don't know enough about Google's actual water use. The city is now going to court to keep that information under wraps, arguing it's a Google "trade secret" exempt from disclosure under Oregon law. Regardless of how the city's suit plays out, the litigation won't be resolved before the city council votes on Google's water deal on the evening of Nov. 8. That means the public won't have access to that information, though city council members do. This new agreement "could boost property tax collections by several million dollars a year but still figure to save Google tens of millions of dollars over the 15-year life of the tax breaks," the report notes. "It doesn't appear Google can proceed without more water, however."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The third time my 1999 Honda Civic was stolen, I had a plan," writes Washington Post technology reporter Heather Kelly. Specifically, it was a tile tracker hidden in the car, "quietly transmitting its approximate location over Bluetooth."Later that day, I was across town hiding down the block from my own car as police detained the surprised driver. When the Tile app pinged me with a last known location, I showed up expecting the car to be abandoned. I quickly realized it was still in use, with one person looking through the trunk and another napping in the passenger seat, so I called the police... In April of this year, one month after my car was stolen, Apple released the $29 AirTag, bringing an even more effective Bluetooth tracking technology to a much wider audience. Similar products from Samsung and smaller brands such as Chipolo are testing the limits of how far people will go to get back their stolen property and what they consider justice. "The technology has unintended consequences. It basically gives the owner the ability to become a mini surveillance operation," said Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at the American University Washington College of Law... Apple has been careful to never say AirTags can be used to recover stolen property. The marketing for the device is light and wholesome, focusing on situations like lost keys between sofa cushions. The official tagline is "Lose your knack for losing things" and there's no mention of crime, theft or stealing in any of the ads, webpages or support documents. But in reality, the company has built a network that is ideal for that exact use case. Every compatible iPhone, iPad and Mac is being silently put to work as a location device without their owners knowing when it happens. An AirTag uses Bluetooth to send out a ping with its encrypted location to the closest Apple devices, which pass that information on to the Apple cloud. That spot is visible on a map in the Find My app. The AirTag owner can also turn on Lost Mode to get a notification the next time it's detected, as well as leave contact information in case it's found. Apple calls this the Find My network, and it also works for lost or stolen Apple devices and a handful of third-party products. The proliferation of compatible Apple devices — there are nearly a billion in the network around the world — makes Find My incredibly effective, especially in cities. (Apple device owners are part of the Find My network by default, but can opt out in settings, and the location information is all encrypted...) All the tracker companies recommend contacting law enforcement first, which may sound logical until you find yourself waiting hours in a parking lot for officers to address a relatively low-priority crime, or having to explain to them what Bluetooth trackers are. The Times shares stories of two people who tried using AirTags to track down their stolen property. One Seattle man tracked down his stolen electric bike — and ended up pedalling away furiously on the (now out of power) bicycle as the suspected thief chased after him. And an Ohio man waited for hours in an unfamiliar drugstore parking lot for a response from the police, eventually travelling with them to the suspect's house — where his stolen laptop was returned to the police officer by a man holding two babies in his arms. Some parents have even hidden them in their childrens' backpacks, and pet owners have hidden them in their pet's collars, the Times reports — adding that the EFF's director of cybersecurity sees another possibility. "The problem is it's impossible to build a tool that is designed to track down stolen items without also building the perfect tool for stalking."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than 63,000 pounds of trash — including a refrigerator — have now been removed from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, reports USA Today:A half-mile long trash-trapping system named "Jenny" was sent out in late July to collect waste, pulling out many items that came from humans like toothbrushes, VHS tapes, golf balls, shoes and fishing gear. Jenny made nine trash extractions over the 12-week cleanup phase, with one extraction netting nearly 20,000 pounds of debris by itself. The mountain of recovered waste arrived in British Columbia, Canada, this month, with much of it set to be recycled. But this was not a one-off initiative. In fact, it was simply a testing phase. And the cleanup team is hoping it's only the start of more to come: more equipment, more extractions and cleaner oceans. The catalyst behind the cleaning is The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit trying to rid the world's oceans of plastic. Boyan Slat, who founded the organization in 2013 at the age of 18, called the most recent testing phase a success, but said there's still much to be done. The 27-year-old from the Netherlands said the group can enter a new phase of cleanup after testing eased some scalability concerns and proved that the system could accomplish what it was designed to do: collect debris... It hopes to deploy enough cleaning systems to reduce the size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by 50% every five years and to initiate a 90% reduction in floating ocean plastic by 2040... While Jenny tackles the garbage patch, The Ocean Cleanup will work on a larger, full-scale cleaning system set to be released in summer 2022 that expects to be the blueprint for creating a fleet of systems. Slat projects they will need 10 full-scale systems to clean the patch at a rate of just under 20,000 tons per year, which would put the group on par to reach its goal of reducing the mass by 50% in five years. The garbage patch now has its own page on Wikipedia, which points out that some of the plastic in the patch is over 50 years old. "The patch is believed to have increased '10-fold each decade' since 1945. Estimated to be double the size of Texas, the area contains more than 3 million tons of plastic." So it's even more amazing that "It's within the realm of possibility for the first time since the invention of plastic that we can clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch," Slat tells USA Today. The group also says that 95% of the plastic it collects can be recycled. And they've already begun turning that plastic into products like sunglasses to be sold on its website.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Microsoft software engineer working on open-source technologies recently wrote that "you can find an open-source implementation for (almost) anything. "But the mobile landscape is a notable exception."While there are some open-source success stories, Android being a massive one, only a handful of major companies rule hardware and software innovation for the devices we carry in our pockets. Together, Apple and Samsung hold over 50 percent of the world's market share for mobile devices, a figure that underscores just how few dominant players exist in the space. Numbers like these might leave you feeling somber about the overall viability of mobile open source. But a growing demand for better security and privacy, among other factors, may be turning the tides, and a host of inspectable, open-source solutions with transparent life cycle processes are emerging as promising alternatives.... Along with the open-source messaging app Telegram, Signal has garnered attention as a more privacy-focused alternative to apps like Facebook Messenger. The browser Chromium and the mobile game 2048 are other noteworthy examples, as well as proof that although open-source apps aren't the norm, they can be widely adopted and popular. For example, over 65 percent of mobile traffic flows through Chromium-based browsers... Despite the many open-source technologies available to help build mobile apps, there's plenty of room to grow in the user-facing space — especially as more people recognize the value of having open-source and open-governance applications that can better safeguard their personal information. That growth isn't likely to extend to the hardware space, where the cost of building open-source implementations isn't as rewarding for developers or users — though we may start to see more devices that allow people to choose individual hardware modules from a variety of providers. The article does cite the open source mobile hardware company Purism. And there's plenty of interesting open source software for mobile app developers, including frameworks like Apache Cordova (which lets developers use CSS3, HTML5, and JavaScript) and a whole ecosystem of open source libraries. But it all does raise the question... Why aren't there more open source solutions for mobile devices?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: 40 years ago the Rolling Stones released the song "Start Me Up" as part of their album Tattoo You. Then over the next four decades they built a reputation as a surprisingly tech-savvy band... In 1994 they became the first major recording artists to broadcast live online using the experimental "Mbone" backbone/virtual network built on top of the Internet, and made one of their new songs available for download on an FTP site. In 1995 they licensed "Start Me Up" for an ad campaign promoting Microsoft's Windows 95 (the first version of Windows including a Start button). Now on the 40th anniversary of Tattoo You, the Rolling Stones have re-released the album with nine previously unreleased tracks from the same era, "recently completed and enhanced with additional vocals and guitar." And, according to Rolling Stone magazine, they've also collaborated with Boston Dynamics to recreate the "Start Me Up" music video "with the tech company's robot dogs....the first time Boston Dynamics have employed the technology to reenact a music video." "Pout. Prance. Repeat," quips a headline at CNET. "Robo-dog Spot performs a rollicking Rolling Stones tribute..." noting there's also additional Spot robots standing in for the other members of the band. ("There's a Spot-Jagger, a Spot-Keith Richards, a Spot-Ronnie Wood and a Spot-Charlie Watts..." Though for some reason there's no robot for bassist Bill Wyman.) It's being billed as a collaboration between Boston Dynamics and the Rolling Stones, and Friday the band's official Twitter account tweeted a highlight from the video — along with their reaction. "Thank you to the Boston Dynamics team for making this happen."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

To fund the Truth social network, former U.S. president Trump merged it with a special purpose acquisition company (or "SPAC"), reports the New York Times. "The result is that Mr. Trump — largely shut out of the mainstream financial industry because of his history of bankruptcies and loan defaults — secured nearly $300 million in funding for his new business." But there may be a hitch:To get his deal done, Mr. Trump ventured into an unregulated and sometimes shadowy corner of Wall Street, working with an unlikely cast of characters: the former "Apprentice" contestants, a small Chinese investment firm and a little-known Miami banker named Patrick Orlando. Mr. Orlando had been discussing a deal with Mr. Trump since at least March, according to people familiar with the talks and a confidential investor presentation reviewed by The New York Times. That was well before his SPAC, Digital World Acquisition, made its debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange last month. In doing so, Mr. Orlando's SPAC may have skirted securities laws and stock exchange rules, lawyers said... SPACs aren't supposed to have a merger planned at the time of their I.P.O. Lawyers and industry officials said that talks between Mr. Orlando and Mr. Trump or their associates consequently could draw scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Another issue is that Digital World's securities filings repeatedly stated that the company and its executives had not engaged in any "substantive discussions, directly or indirectly," with a target company — even though Mr. Orlando had been in discussions with Mr. Trump. Given the politically fraught nature of a deal with Mr. Trump, securities lawyers said that Digital World's lack of disclosure about those conversations could be considered an omission of "material information." The Times adds that Trump had previously even discussed merging Trump Media with a smaller SPAC created with help from the same Shanghai-based investment bank — which "specialized in helping Chinese companies list on U.S. stock exchanges."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

To fund the Truth social network, former U.S. president Trump merged it with a special purpose acquisition company (or "SPAC"), reports the New York Times. "The result is that Mr. Trump — largely shut out of the mainstream financial industry because of his history of bankruptcies and loan defaults — secured nearly $300 million in funding for his new business." But there may be a hitch:To get his deal done, Mr. Trump ventured into an unregulated and sometimes shadowy corner of Wall Street, working with an unlikely cast of characters: the former "Apprentice" contestants, a small Chinese investment firm and a little-known Miami banker named Patrick Orlando. Mr. Orlando had been discussing a deal with Mr. Trump since at least March, according to people familiar with the talks and a confidential investor presentation reviewed by The New York Times. That was well before his SPAC, Digital World Acquisition, made its debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange last month. In doing so, Mr. Orlando's SPAC may have skirted securities laws and stock exchange rules, lawyers said... SPACs aren't supposed to have a merger planned at the time of their I.P.O. Lawyers and industry officials said that talks between Mr. Orlando and Mr. Trump or their associates consequently could draw scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Another issue is that Digital World's securities filings repeatedly stated that the company and its executives had not engaged in any "substantive discussions, directly or indirectly," with a target company — even though Mr. Orlando had been in discussions with Mr. Trump. Given the politically fraught nature of a deal with Mr. Trump, securities lawyers said that Digital World's lack of disclosure about those conversations could be considered an omission of "material information." The Times adds that Trump had previously even discussed merging Trump Media with a smaller SPAC created with help from the same Shanghai-based investment bank — which "specialized in helping Chinese companies list on U.S. stock exchanges."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Something is slowing internet subscriber growth at Comcast and Charter, reports Bloomberg, "raising concerns about an end to what has been a huge growth business." But why? Explanations ranging from a slowdown in consumer spending to competition from phone giants. Slashdot reader JoeyRox shared this report from Bloomberg: Charter on Friday reported 25% fewer new broadband subscribers than analysts estimated and said the overall number of new customers would fall back to 2018 levels. Comcast, which had earlier cut its subscriber forecast, reported 300,000 new internet customers Thursday, less than half the number added a year ago. Analysts were expecting some slowdown in demand coming off 2020, a year when broadband sign-ups spiked as the pandemic shifted people to working and schooling from home. Still, with Charter echoing Comcast's gloomy picture from Thursday, suddenly there's a chill on the cable broadband front, which became the most prized segment of the business as consumers cut traditional TV service. Charter's shortfall raises "questions about whether this is the beginning of the end of the cable broadband story," said Geetha Ranganathan, an industry analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence... Both Charter and Comcast blamed a slower new home market for some of the slack in demand, leaving the companies to try and squeeze more business out of their saturated markets. Other factors could include a dropoff in lower-paying customers as government assisted broadband funds dry up... New competition from phone companies certainly doesn't help. AT&T Inc. is expanding its network and added 289,000 new fiber internet customers last quarter. Meanwhile, T-Mobile US Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. are very excited about new wireless home broadband offers that aim directly at cable and outlying areas where cable could potentially expand. Changes in TV viewing may also be a factor. For decades, cable companies sold TV and internet in discounted bundles. With rise of streaming video "the cable promos aren't as appealing for broadband only," Lopez said. Even as Comcast and Charter deploy new faster network technology to attract more lucrative customers, cable's share of the market is starting to shrink, according to Tammy Parker, a senior analyst with GlobalData.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"U.S. tech giant Google has paid Russia more than 32 million roubles ($455,079) in fines," reports Reuters, "for failing to delete content Moscow deems illegal, the company and a Russian lawmaker said after talks on Monday."Russia last week said it would seek to fine the U.S. tech giant a percentage of its annual Russian turnover later this month for repeatedly failing to delete banned content on its search engine and YouTube, in Moscow's strongest move yet to rein in foreign tech firms... Russia's state communications regulator, Roskomnadzor, on Monday said it has the technical capability to slow down the speed of YouTube, Interfax reported, but that administrative measures are currently sufficient. In 2020, Google's compliance with requests to delete content was 96.2%, Pancini said, and in the first half of this year, it removed over 489,000 videos, but Russia said too much banned content still remained available.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Tesla Oracle blog reports on a newly-released security feature "that enables Tesla owners to remotely view what's happening around their vehicles in real-time using their mobile phones..." "While you have opened the live camera view of your parked Tesla car, you can talk back to the people in the vehicle's surroundings."The Tesla vehicle will change your voice, amplify and output it via an external speaker installed under the car. Teslas built since January 2019 have this speaker installed as part of the pedestrian warning system, a requirement by the NHTSA.In the last year's holiday software update package, Tesla introduced the Boombox feature using this external speak. Boombox lets Tesla owners add custom horn and pedestrian warning sounds to the vehicle. Tesla owners will now be able to warn potential vandals more explicitly by giving them verbal warnings from a remote location... In a tweet Wednesday, Elon Musk joked the feature was also "great for practical jokes."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

new nukes"A sophisticated electronic sensor buried in hardened metal shells at the tip of a growing number of America's ballistic missiles reflects a significant achievement in weapons engineering that experts say could help pave the way for reductions in the size of the country's nuclear arsenal," reports the Washington Post, "but also might create new security perils." The wires, sensors, batteries and computing gear now being installed on hundreds of the most powerful U.S. warheads give them an enhanced ability to detonate with what the military considers exquisite timing over some of the world's most challenging targets, substantially increasing the probability that in the event of a major conflict, those targets would be destroyed in a radioactive rain of fire, heat and unearthly explosive pressures. The new components — which determine and set the best height for a nuclear blast — are now being paired with other engineering enhancements that collectively increase what military planners refer to as the individual nuclear warheads' "hard-target kill capability." This gives them an improved ability to destroy Russian and Chinese nuclear-tipped missiles and command posts in hardened silos or mountain sanctuaries, or to obliterate military command and storage bunkers in North Korea, also considered a potential U.S. nuclear target. The increased destructiveness of the warheads means that in some cases fewer weapons could be needed to ensure that all the objectives in the nation's nuclear targeting plans are fully met, opening a path to future shrinkage of the overall arsenal, current and former U.S. officials said in a number of interviews, in which some spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive technology. Production of the first of many high-yield nuclear warheads containing the gear, developed over the past decade at a cost of billions of dollars, was completed in July for installation on missiles aboard Navy submarines, the National Nuclear Security Administration announced. The Post notes that the U.S. has now installed the technology on hundreds of submarine-based warheads, doubling their destructive power (according to estimates by a Georgetown professor). The acting administrator of America's National Nuclear Security Administration called it "the culmination of over a decade of work."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phoronix ran some fun performance tests this week. "Now that Windows 11 has been out as stable and the initial round of updates coming out, I've been running fresh Windows 11 vs. Linux benchmarks for seeing how Microsoft's latest operating system release compares to the fresh batch of Linux distributions."First up is the fresh look at the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance on an Intel Core i9 11900K Rocket Lake system... The Windows 11 performance was being compared to all of the latest prominent Linux distributions, including: - Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS- Ubuntu 21.10- Arch Linux (latest rolling)- Fedora Workstation 35- Clear Linux 35150 [...] Each operating system was cleanly installed and then run at its OS default settings for seeing how the out-of-the-box OS performance compares for these five Linux distributions to Microsoft Windows 11 Pro... The geometric mean for all 44 tests showed Linux clearly in front of Windows 11 for this current-generation Intel platform. Ubuntu / Arch / Fedora were about 11% faster overall than Windows 11 Pro on this system. Meanwhile, Clear Linux was about 18% faster than Windows 11 and enjoyed about 5% better performance overall than the other Linux distributions. Out of 44 tests, here's a breakdown of how many first-place wins were scored by each OS:Clear Linux: 33 (75%)Fedora Workstation 35: 4 (9.1%)Windows 11 Pro: 3 (6.8%)Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS: 2 (4.5%)Arch Linux: 1 (2.3%)Ubuntu 21.10: 1 (2.3%)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Every hour, YouTube deletes nearly 2,000 channels," reports the New York Times. "The deletions are meant to keep out spam, misinformation, financial scams, nudity, hate speech and other material that it says violates its policies. "But the rules are opaque and sometimes arbitrarily enforced," they write — and sometimes, YouTube does end up making mistakes. (Alternate URL here...)The gatekeeper role leads to criticism from multiple directions. Many on the right of the political spectrum in the United States and Europe claim that YouTube unfairly blocks them. Some civil society groups say YouTube should do more to stop the spread of illicit content and misinformation... Roughly 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute globally in different languages. "It's impossible to get our minds around what it means to try and govern that kind of volume of content," said Evelyn Douek, senior research fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. "YouTube is a juggernaut, by some metrics as big or bigger than Facebook." In its email on Tuesday morning, YouTube said Novara Media [a left-leaning London news group] was guilty of "repeated violations" of YouTube's community guidelines, without elaborating. Novara's staff was left guessing what had caused the problem. YouTube typically has a three-strikes policy before deleting a channel. It had penalized Novara only once before... Novara's last show released before the deletion was about sewage policy, which hardly seemed worthy of YouTube's attention. One of the organization's few previous interactions with YouTube was when the video service sent Novara a silver plaque for reaching 100,000 subscribers... Staff members worried it had been a coordinated campaign by critics of their coverage to file complaints with YouTube, triggering its software to block their channel, a tactic sometimes used by right-wing groups to go after opponents.... An editor, Gary McQuiggin, filled out YouTube's online appeal form. He then tried using YouTube's online chat bot, speaking with a woman named "Rose," who said, "I know this is important," before the conversation crashed. Angry and frustrated, Novara posted a statement on Twitter and other social media services about the deletion. "We call on YouTube to immediately reinstate our account," it said. The post drew attention in the British press and from members of Parliament. Within a few hours, Novara's channel had been restored. Later, YouTube said Novara had been mistakenly flagged as spam, without providing further detail. "We work quickly to review all flagged content," YouTube said in a statement, "but with millions of hours of video uploaded on YouTube every day, on occasion we make the wrong call " But Ed Procter, chief executive of the Independent Monitor for the Press, told the Times that it was at least the fifth time that a news outlet had material deleted by YouTube, Facebook or Twitter without warning.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A white-haired, green-eyed pixelated character known as a CryptoPunk 9998 just sold for more than half a billion U.S. dollars -- or so it appeared -- the latest wild development in the booming non-fungible token space. But the Ethereum blockchain shows the money from the NFT trade ended up right back where it started, raising the question of why anyone bothered. Bloomberg reports: The process started Thursday at 6:13 p.m. New York time, when someone using an Ethereum address beginning with 0xef76 transferred the CryptoPunk to an address starting with 0x8e39. The process started Thursday at 6:13 p.m. New York time, when someone using an Ethereum address beginning with 0xef76 transferred the CryptoPunk to an address starting with 0x8e39. To pay for the trade, the buyer shipped the Ether tokens to the CryptoPunk's smart contract, which transferred them to the seller -- normal stuff, a buyer settling up with a seller. But the seller then sent the 124,457 Ether back to the buyer, who repaid the loans. And then the last step: the avatar was given back to the original address, 0xef76, and offered up for sale again for 250,000 Ether, or more than $1 billion. Larva Labs, which created the CryptoPunks, said on Twitter that "someone bought this punk from themself with borrowed money and repaid the loan in the same transaction." Evidently, this isn't the first time this has happened. "Some recent large bids were done the same way. The ether is offered and removed in a single transaction. So, while technically briefly valid, the bid can never be accepted. We'll add filtering to avoid generating notifications for these kinds of transactions in the future." In conventional, regulated securities markets, this would be called wash trading, which is banned on grounds that trading with yourself can artificially inflate prices and suggest more demand than really exists.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The documents leaked to U.S. regulators by a Facebook whistleblower "reveal that the social media giant has privately and meticulously tracked real-world harms exacerbated by its platforms," reports the Washington Post. Yet it also reports that at the same time Facebook "ignored warnings from its employees about the risks of their design decisions and exposed vulnerable communities around the world to a cocktail of dangerous content." And in addition, the whistleblower also argued that due to Mark Zuckberg's "unique degree of control" over Facebook, he's ultimately personally response for what the Post describes as "a litany of societal harms caused by the company's relentless pursuit of growth."Zuckerberg testified last year before Congress that the company removes 94 percent of the hate speech it finds before a human reports it. But in internal documents, researchers estimated that the company was removing less than 5 percent of all hate speech on Facebook... For all Facebook's troubles in North America, its problems with hate speech and misinformation are dramatically worse in the developing world. Documents show that Facebook has meticulously studied its approach abroad, and is well aware that weaker moderation in non-English-speaking countries leaves the platform vulnerable to abuse by bad actors and authoritarian regimes. According to one 2020 summary, the vast majority of its efforts against misinformation — 84 percent — went toward the United States, the documents show, with just 16 percent going to the "Rest of World," including India, France and Italy... Facebook chooses maximum engagement over user safety. Zuckerberg has said the company does not design its products to persuade people to spend more time on them. But dozens of documents suggest the opposite. The company exhaustively studies potential policy changes for their effects on user engagement and other factors key to corporate profits. Amid this push for user attention, Facebook abandoned or delayed initiatives to reduce misinformation and radicalization... Starting in 2017, Facebook's algorithm gave emoji reactions like "angry" five times the weight as "likes," boosting these posts in its users' feeds. The theory was simple: Posts that prompted lots of reaction emoji tended to keep users more engaged, and keeping users engaged was the key to Facebook's business. The company's data scientists eventually confirmed that "angry" reaction, along with "wow" and "haha," occurred more frequently on "toxic" content and misinformation. Last year, when Facebook finally set the weight on the angry reaction to zero, users began to get less misinformation, less "disturbing" content and less "graphic violence," company data scientists found. The Post also contacted a Facebook spokeswoman for their response. The spokewoman denied that Zuckerberg "makes decisions that cause harm" and then also dismissed the findings as being "based on selected documents that are mischaracterized and devoid of any context..." Responding to the spread of specific pieces of misinformation on Facebook, the spokeswoman went as far to acknowledge that at Facebook, "We have no commercial or moral incentive to do anything other than give the maximum number of people as much of a positive experience as possible." She added that the company is "constantly making difficult decisions."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: A new study from the [CDC] finds that vaccination provides better protection against hospitalization with COVID-19 than a previous infection with the virus. The analysis found people hospitalized with coronavirus-like symptoms were more than five times more likely to test positive for COVID-19 if they had had recent prior infection than if they were recently vaccinated. The study released Friday examined more than 7,000 people across nine states and 187 hospitals, comparing those who were unvaccinated and had previously had the coronavirus in the last three to six months and those who were vaccinated over the same time frame. The CDC urged even those who were previously infected to get their shots. [...] Overall, [CDC Director Rochelle Walensky] said at a press briefing earlier this week that the hospitalization rate among unvaccinated people is 12 times higher than for vaccinated people. The vaccination rate for those 12 and older has now reached 78 percent with at least one shot, but Walensky noted that still leaves more than 60 million eligible Americans unvaccinated.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA is calling on any interested humans to contribute to the machine learning algorithms that help Perseverance get around. All you need to do is look at some images and label geological features. ExtremeTech reports: The project is known as AI4Mars, and it's a continuation of a project started last year using images from Curiosity. That particular rover arrived on Mars in 2012 and has been making history ever since. NASA used Curiosity as the starting point when designing Perseverance. The new rover has 23 cameras, which capture a ton of visual data from Mars, but the robot has to rely on human operators to interpret most of those images. The rover has enhanced AI to help it avoid obstacles, and it will get even better if you chip in. The AI4Mars site lets you choose between Opportunity, Curiosity, and the new Perseverance images. After selecting the kind of images you want to scope out, the site will provide you with several different marker types and explanations of what each one is. For example, the NavCam asks you to ID sand, consolidated soil (where the wheels will get good traction), bedrock, and big rocks. There are examples of all these formations, so it's a snap to get started.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nasa's Juno mission, the solar-powered robotic explorer of Jupiter, has completed its five-year prime mission to reveal the inner workings of the Solar System's biggest planet. The most recent findings from these measurements have now been published in a series of papers, revealing the three-dimensional structure of Jupiter's weather systems -- including of its famous Great Red Spot, a centuries-old storm big enough to swallow the Earth whole. The Conversation reports: Jupiter's Great Red Spot has had a hard time in recent years. [...] But fans of the storm can take comfort from Juno's latest findings. In 2017, Juno was able to observe the red spot in microwave light. Then, in 2019, as Juno flew at more than 200,000 kilometers per hour above the vortex, Nasa's Deep Space Network was monitoring the spacecraft's velocity from millions of kilometers away. Tiny changes as small as 0.01 millimeters per second were detected, caused by the gravitational force from the massive spot. By modeling the microwave and gravity data, my colleagues and I were able to determine that the famous storm is at least 300 km (186 miles) deep, maybe as deep as 500 km (310 miles). That's deeper than the expected cloud-forming "weather layer" that reaches down to around 65 km (40 miles) below the surface, but higher than the jet streams that might extend down to 3,000 km (1,864 miles). The deeper the roots, the more likely the Red Spot is to persist in the years to come, despite the superficial battering it has been receiving from passing storms. To place the depth in perspective, the International Space Station orbits ~420 km (260 miles) above Earth's surface. Yet despite these new findings, the spot could still be a "pancake-like" structure floating in the bottomless atmosphere, with the spot's 12,000 km (7,456 mile) width being 40 times larger than its depth. In the cloud-forming weather layer, Juno's microwave antennae saw the expected structure of belts and zones. The cool zones appeared dark, indicating the presence of ammonia gas, which absorbs microwave light. Conversely, the belts were bright in microwave light, consistent with a lack of ammonia. These bright and dark bands in the weather layer were perfectly aligned with the winds higher up, measured at the top of the clouds. But what happens when we probe deeper? The temperature of Jupiter's atmosphere is just right for the formation of a water cloud around 65 km (40 miles) down below the cloud tops. When Juno peered through this layer, it found something unexpected. The belts became microwave-dark, and the zones became microwave-bright. This is the complete reverse of what we saw in the shallower cloudy regions, and we are calling this transition layer the "jovicline" -- some 45-80 km (28-50 miles) below the visible clouds. [...] The jovicline may separate the shallow cloud-forming weather layer from the deep abyss below. This unexpected result implies something is moving all that ammonia around. One possibility is that each jet stream is associated with a "circulation cell," a climate phenomenon that moves gases around via currents of rising and falling air. The rising could cause ammonia enrichment, and the sinking ammonia depletion. If true, there would be about eight of these circulation cells in each hemisphere. [...] Other meteorological phenomena might be responsible for moving the ammonia around within this deep atmosphere. For example, vigorous storms in Jupiter's belts might create mushy ammonia-water hailstones (known as "mushballs"), which deplete ammonia within the shallow belts before falling deep, eventually evaporating to enrich the belts at great depths.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from InterestingEngineering: Energy densities of lithium-ion batteries haven't reached the potential where long-range flights can be undertaken. So, a Colorado-based startup, H3X, looked to the electric motor for ways to improve its power capacity. The team started from scratch, looking at the various components of the electric motor. Comprised of a gearbox, a power delivery system, and a main motor, these components are usually housed separately to allow sufficient cooling space, without which could result in engine failure. However, using advances in material science and electronics, coupled with the ability to 3D-print structures such as copper, the team managed to put all components together into a single housing that weighs just 33 pounds (15 kg) without impacting their cooling needs. Their motor, called the HPDM-250, is much smaller than their contemporaries and has a lesser mass as well. The company claims that, according to the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) guidelines, a propulsion system of a commercial aircraft such as Boeing 737 must deliver a continuous power density of 12 kW/kg. However, conventional electric motors can only generate a maximum of up to 4kW/kg. Thanks to its reduced weight, the HPDM-250's power density clocks up to an impressive 13kW/kg. According to H3X, this is sufficient to power any mass-sensitive or high-performance application such as electric boats and has urban air mobility applications. Among the other targets for the company that remain in the distance are short-haul, large commercial flights in the sub-1000 mile range. Max Liben, Chief Technology Office at H3X, told TechCrunch that using advanced technologies made the manufacturing of their electric motor less laborious and yet not very expensive. Even when putting the components together, the team was conscious of maintenance needs and has ensured that servicing their motors is hassle-free as well. Whether powered by electric batteries or hydrogen fuel, these advanced electric motors are likely to play a role in enabling electric air mobility, even over longer distances.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a post on the Signal blog, a federal grand jury in the Central District of California has subpoena'd Signal for a whole pile of user data, like subscriber information, financial information, transaction histories, communications, and more. HotHardware reports: The thing is, the subpoena is moot: Signal simply doesn't have the data to provide. The company can't provide any of the data that the grand jury is asking for because, as the company itself notes, "Signal doesn't have access to your messages, your chat list, your groups, your contacts, your stickers, [or] your profile name or avatar." The only things that Signal can offer up to the court are Unix timestamps for when the accounts in question were created and last accessed the service. The announcement (and, we suppose, this news post) essentially amounts to an advertisement for Signal, but it's an amusing -- or possibly distressing -- anecdote nonetheless. While Signal is secure, keep in mind that the messages still originate from your device, which means that other apps on your device (like, say, your keyboard) could still be leaking your data. Lest you doubt Signal's story, the app creators have published the subpoena, suitably redacted, on their blog.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mastodon has sent former President Donald Trump's company a formal notification that it's breaking the rules by using Mastodon's open-source code to build its social network, named Truth. The Verge reports: This news comes from a blog post by Mastodon's founder Eugen Rochko, but others have previously pointed out that the organization behind Truth, the Trump Media and Technology Group (or TMTG), was violating Mastodon's software license by not providing the source code for the site built on top of it. Trump's group has 30 days from when the letter was sent to comply with the license or stop using the software, or it could lose the right to do so. While Truth hasn't officially launched yet, internet users discovered that a test version basically had the same interface as Mastodon, and that some of the code for the site was unchanged from the other social network's code. By itself, that's actually the intended use of open-source software -- but as the Software Freedom Conservancy pointed out last week, apps or websites based on software that uses the AGPLv3 license have to in turn provide their own source code. According to the foundation that wrote AGPL, it's meant to make the community's software better: if you improve on something that someone else made, they should be able to benefit from your work like you did theirs. As Mastodon and Rochko reiterated on Friday, though, TMTG hasn't done that -- it even went as far as to call its software "proprietary," and seemingly tried to hide the fact that it was based on Mastodon. Now that the Truth has been revealed, however, TMTG will either have to rebuild it without using Mastodon's code -- a tall order, as bootstrapping a social network site isn't particularly easy -- or release its source code and change the terms of service.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The head of America's Intelligence Community reports that the U.S. intelligence community "was able to reach broad agreement" on several key issues about the origins of COVID-19. "We judge the virus was not developed as a biological weapon," they announced today. In addition, the U.S. intelligence community report includes a second new assessment: that China's officials "did not have foreknowledge of the virus before the initial outbreak of COVID-19 emerged." Beyond that, they note that most of the intelligence community's agencies also specifically assess that SARS-CoV-2 "probably was not genetically engineered" (albeit with "low confidence"). Of the 19 member agencies in the U.S. intelligence community, just two believed that there just wasn't enough evidence to actually issue an assessment of either possibility, the report adds. The [U.S.] intelligence community judges they will be unable to provide a more definitive explanation for the origin of COVID-19 unless new information allows them to determine the specific pathway for initial natural contact with an animal or to determine that a laboratory in Wuhan was handling SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor virus before COVID-19 emerged. The intelligence community — and the global scientific community — lacks clinical samples or a complete understanding of epidemiological data from the earliest COVID-19 cases. If we obtain information on the earliest cases that identified a location of interest or occupational exposure, it may alter our evaluation of hypotheses. China's cooperation most likely would be needed to reach a conclusive assessment of the origins of COVID-19. Beijing, however, continues to hinder the global investigation, resist sharing information, and blame other countries, including the United States. These actions reflect, in part, China's government's own uncertainty about where an investigation could lead as well as its frustration the international community is using the issue to exert political pressure on China. In assessing whether a lab incident or a "natural" exposure to an infected animal caused the outbreak, they cited assessments from eight different U.S. intelligence community elements. Half of them agreed with the National Intelligence Council assessment (with low confidence) "that the initial SARS-CoV-2 infection was most likely caused by natural exposure to an animal infected with it or a close progenitor virus — a virus that probably would be more than 99 percent similar to SARS-CoV-2. These analysts give weight to China's officials' lack of foreknowledge, the numerous vectors for natural exposure, and other factors." Three of the remaining four "remain unable to coalesce around either explanation without additional information, with some analysts favoring natural origin, others a laboratory origin, and some seeing the hypotheses as equally likely." One element did assess "with moderate confidence that the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was the result of a laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology... Variations in analytic views largely stem from differences in how agencies weigh intelligence reporting and scientific publications and intelligence and scientific gaps." The 18-page assessment includes an appendix addressing details of specific theories, but ultimately concludes that "Our growing understanding of the similarities of SARS-CoV-2 to other coronaviruses in nature and the ability of betacoronaviruses — the genus to which SARS-CoV-2 belongs — to naturally recombine suggests SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered." It even notes that the much-discussed furin cleavage sites "have been identified in naturally occurring coronaviruses in the same genetic location [as in SARS-CoV-2]. This suggests that SARS-CoV-2 or a progenitor virus could have acquired its furin cleavage sites through natural recombination with another virus."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Oculus consulting CTO John Carmack has been bullish on the idea of "the metaverse" for a long time, as he'll be among the first to point out. But the id Software co-founder spent a good chunk of his wide-ranging Connect keynote Thursday sounding pretty skeptical of plans by the newly rebranded Meta (formerly Facebook) to actually build that metaverse. "I really do care about [the metaverse], and I buy into the vision," Carmack said, before quickly adding, "I have been pretty actively arguing against every single metaverse effort that we have tried to spin up internally in the company from even pre-acquisition times." The reason for that seeming contradiction is a somewhat ironic one, as Carmack puts it: "I have pretty good reasons to believe that setting out to build the metaverse is not actually the best way to wind up with the metaverse." Today, Carmack said, "The most obvious path to the metaverse is that you have one single universal app, something like Roblox." That said, Carmack added, "I doubt a single application will get to that level of taking over everything." That's because a single bad decision by the creators of that walled-garden metaverse can cut off too many possibilities for users and makers. "I just don't believe that one player -- one company -- winds up making all the right decisions for this," he said. The idea of the metaverse, Carmack says, can be "a honeypot trap for 'architecture astronauts.'" Those are the programmers and designers who "want to only look at things from the very highest levels," he said, while skipping the "nuts and bolts details" of how these things actually work. These so-called architecture astronauts, Carmack said, "want to talk in high abstract terms about how we'll have generic objects that can contain other objects that can have references to these and entitlements to that, and we can pass control from one to the other." That kind of high-level hand-waving makes Carmack "just want to tear [his] hair out... because that's just so not the things that are actually important when you're building something." "But here we are," Carmack continued. "Mark Zuckerberg has decided that now is the time to build the metaverse, so enormous wheels are turning and resources are flowing and the effort is definitely going to be made."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hive, a ransomware group that has hit over 30 organizations since June 2021, now also encrypts Linux and FreeBSD using new malware variants specifically developed to target these platforms. BleepingComputer reports: However, as Slovak internet security firm ESET discovered, Hive's new encryptors are still in development and still lack functionality. The Linux variant also proved to be quite buggy during ESET's analysis, with the encryption completely failing when the malware was executed with an explicit path. It also comes with support for a single command line parameter (-no-wipe). In contrast, Hive's Windows ransomware comes with up to 5 execution options, including killing processes and skipping disk cleaning, uninteresting files, and older files. The ransomware's Linux version also fails to trigger the encryption if executed without root privileges because it attempts to drop the ransom note on compromised devices' root file systems.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At an event in Japan today, Toyota unveiled its first all-electric car: the bZ4X. Electrek reports: "bZ" stands for "beyond zero," which is Toyota's latest electrification strategy and a sort of sub-brand for its upcoming electric vehicles, starting with the bZ4X. The electric SUV hasn't been updated much from the concept. It still features some sharp lines and aggressive design. In terms of specs, we finally have more details. Toyota has been clear that every spec it released today is for the Japanese version of the car. Details on the US version are expected to come next month, but it should still give us a good idea. The vehicle is equipped with a 71.4 kWh battery pack. As for what range it enables, Toyota is only releasing right now "cruising range per charge (WLTC)," which it claims to be 500 km (310 miles) for the front-wheel drive version and 460 km (286 miles) for the all-wheel-drive version. The front-wheel-drive version is equipped with a single 150 kW motor while the all-wheel-drive version is equipped with an 80 kW motor on each axle. The DC fast-charging capacity is apparently capped at 150 kW and Toyota says that it can charge to 80% state-of-charge in about 30 minutes with that capacity. First off, it's capable of bidirectional charging for vehicle-to-home capacity. It's also offered with an optional solar roof, which Toyota says can "generates electricity equivalent to 1,800 km of driving distance per year." Toyota is also offering the bZ4X with an optional "wing-shaped" steering wheel, which the automaker claims improve visibility. The electric SUV is expected to land first in Japan in mid-2022. More details about pricing, specs and features will be available in the coming months. The news comes after the company said it expects to spend more than $13.5 billion to develop EV battery tech and supply by 2030.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: So far this year, almost 1,000 schools across the country have suffered from a ransomware attack, and in some cases had classes disrupted because of it, according to tallies by Emsisoft, a cybersecurity company that specializes in tracking and investigating ransomware attacks, and another cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. Brett Callow, a researcher at Emsisoft shared the list with Motherboard. It includes 73 school districts, comprising 985 schools. Callow said that it's very likely there's some schools that are missing from the list, meaning the total number of victims is likely higher than 1,000. The list includes schools such as the Mesquite Independent School District in Texas, which comprises 49 different schools; the Haverhill Public Schools in Massachusetts, which comprises 16 schools; and the Visalia Unified School District in California, which comprises 41 schools. "There is a huge jump in ransomware attacks hitting schools starting in 2019 and that trend is accelerating," Allan Liska, a researcher at cybersecurity firm Recorded Future who tracks ransomware, told Motherboard in an online chat. [...] Schools are getting hit every other week, and 2021 was worse than 2020, according to Liska, who said that last year he and his company catalogued 56 ransomware attacks impacting almost 700 schools. "The thing is, as bad as it is right now it will likely get worse before it gets better. While most ransomware attacks are not targeted there are two sectors that ransomware groups do seem to enjoy going after are healthcare and schools," Liska said. "It seems like schools are basically proving ground for ransomware actors to test out their skills. Schools pay significantly less in average ransom than most sectors (when they pay, which is rare), so the ransomware groups are not going after schools for the money."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Pacific lingcod is an ill-tempered, omnivorous fish with a mouth like a messy silverware drawer, its 500-plus teeth arranged haphazardly on two sets of highly mobile jaws. New research, published this month in the scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, reveals that the Pacific lingcod gains and loses an average of 20 teeth every day. From a report: If humans had the same dental scheme, we'd replace a tooth daily. "Kind of makes braces useless," says Adam Summers, professor of biology at the University of Washington and co-author of the study. "And brushing." The Pacific lingcod's rate of tooth replacement came as a surprise to researchers, says study co-author Karly Cohen, a PhD student at the University of Washington studying the biomechanics of feeding. "The existing research we have on tooth replacement comes from oddballs," Cohen says, such as anglerfish that grow teeth on their foreheads, or the piranha, which can lose a quarter of its teeth at a time. "But most fish have teeth like lingcod. And so it could very well be that most fishes are losing mass amounts of their teeth daily" and replacing them quickly, like this species, she adds. The Pacific lingcod is an ornery sportfish about four feet long at adulthood, an ambush predator that frequently indulges in cannibalism. It's found on the North American west coast, from Alaska to Baja California, Mexico, and it's economically important to fishers in part because it's "great in a taco," Cohen says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists have discovered a new phase of water -- adding to liquid, solid and gas -- know as "superionic ice." The "strange black" ice, as scientists called it, is normally created at the core of planets like Neptune and Uranus. From a report: In a study published in Nature Physics, a team of scientists co-led by Vitali Prakapenka, a University of Chicago research professor, detailed the extreme conditions necessary to produce this kind of ice. It had only been glimpsed once before, when scientists sent a massive shockwave through a droplet of water, creating superionic ice that only existed for an instant. In this experiment, the research team took a different approach. They pressed water between two diamonds, the hardest material on Earth, to reproduce the intense pressure that exists at the core of planets. Then, they used the Advanced Photon Source, or high-brightness X-ray beams, to shoot a laser through the diamonds to heat the water, according to the study. "Imagine a cube, a lattice with oxygen atoms at the corners connected by hydrogen when it transforms into this new superionic phase, the lattice expands, allowing the hydrogen atoms to migrate around while the oxygen atoms remain steady in their positions," Prakapenka said in a press release. "It's kind of like a solid oxygen lattice sitting in an ocean of floating hydrogen atoms." Using an X-ray to look at the results, the team found the ice became less dense and was described as black in color because it interacted differently with light. "It's a new state of matter, so it basically acts as a new material, and it may be different from what we thought," Prakapenka said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The University of California, Santa Barbara is preparing to spend $1.5 billion on a new 4,500-person student dorm designed by a billionaire mega-donor whose layout so closely resembles that of a prison a consulting architect resigned in protest, according to the Santa Barbara Independent. From a report: The architect likened it to a "social and psychological experiment with an unknown impact on the lives and personal development of the undergraduates the university serves" in his resignation letter. The building in question is the planned Munger Hall on the university's beachside campus, which the university's website says "will fulfill visions for both UC Santa Barbara and the donor, Charles Munger," a billionaire investor often described as Warren Buffet's "right-hand man." Munger has also financed the construction of graduate residences on the University of Michigan and Stanford campuses fashioned on his architectural ideas to promote collaboration and bonhomie. While the Stanford residences are essentially normal apartments, the Michigan hall resembles its UCSB sibling in that "most bedrooms don't have windows," according to VeryApt.com. The vision Munger Hall is fulfilling is alternately described two ways, depending on who is doing the talking. The universities that take his money -- on condition they use it to build his designs to his exacting specifications, as he reportedly considers himself an amateur architect -- describe such projects as having "a focus on providing ample interactive spaces for students" and "minimizing costs by maximizing the number of beds on a given site, employing the concept of repeatability..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Government Accountability Office today called for a reevaluation of the proposals submitted by Amazon Web Services and Microsoft in connection with a $10 billion cloud contract to enhance the National Security Agency's technology environment. From a report: The $10 billion NSA contract, code-named WildandStormy, was awarded to public cloud market leader AWS earlier this year. Rival Microsoft, which also competed for the deal, filed a protest with the GAO shortly after AWS was named the winner. The agency's decision today represents a win for Microsoft. "GAO found certain aspects of the agency's evaluation to be unreasonable and, in light thereof, recommended that NSA reevaluate the proposals consistent with the decision and make a new source selection determination," Ralph White, managing associate general counsel for the Procurement Law Division at the GAO, told Nextgov in a statement. "GAO's decision expresses no view as to the relative merits of the AWS and Microsoft proposals." Microsoft submitted its protest to the GAO on July 21. The company followed up the move on Sept. 2 by sending a document known as a supplemental protest. According to Nextgov, the decision that the GAO issued today in response to Microsoft's filings is under a protective order because thereâ(TM)s classified information involved. However, officials reportedly plan to release an unclassified decision down the line that will be accessible for the public.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The game formerly known as PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds accounts for 97% of the revenue of its maker Krafton. Given that the Seoul-based company is valued at almost $20 billion, we have a rough estimate for how much this single game is worth, according to the stock market. A good chunk of that value is in the potential that title holds for expansion. From a report: Krafton has staked its future on making PUBG -- no longer an abbreviation but a brand for a wider intellectual property franchise -- into a big fantasy universe spanning different games and entertainment genres. The first big test of this strategy is PUBG: New State, the mobile sequel that moves the battle royale action to 2051 and adds more advanced weaponry, vehicles and graphics. It arrives on Nov. 11. I haven't played it to be able to tell you how good it will be, but I would be hugely surprised if it turns into anything other than another money printer for Krafton. The reason for my confidence is simple: The company isn't straying too far from what made the original 2017 game a hit and is mostly changing the cosmetics atop the underlying physics and gameplay. This approach has proven highly successful in the mobile arena. The smartphone game is launching in more than 200 countries and in 17 different languages and has already had more than 50 million preregistrations. Another essential element for mobile success that Krafton taps into is making the game free to play. The vast majority of smartphone app store revenue comes from games, which seems counterintuitive considering that most of those games demand no upfront payment. The real money, however, is in enticing players to make microtransactions within the game, such as personalizing your character with "skins" or buying a pet or better weapons. This is such a big deal that Epic Games took Apple and Alphabet's Google to court over the split of who gets to profit from those addictive little in-game buys in PUBG rival Fortnite.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple this month unveiled an array of new gadgets: more powerful MacBook laptop computers, AirPod wireless headphones with longer battery life and HomePod Mini speakers in three more colors. But a different and unheralded Apple release is garnering so much interest that it has become the company's most back-ordered new product: a $19, 6.3-by-6.3-inch cloth to wipe smudges and fingerprints off screens. From a report: The cloth, imprinted with the Apple logo in the corner, is made with "soft, nonabrasive material" to clean the screens of iPhones, iPads and MacBooks "safely and effectively," according to the product page. The listing adds that the Polishing Cloth -- capital P, capital C -- is "compatible" with 88 different Apple products. For most U.S. shoppers, shipment is delayed until Jan. 11, at the earliest. Charging $19 for a piece of cloth about the size of two stacked dollar bills is bold even by Apple's standards, a company whose legions of loyal customers are conditioned to stomach steep prices. An Apple-branded set of four wheels to "improve mobility" for the Mac Pro, the company's most expensive desktop computer, is priced at $699, for instance.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cryptocurrency firms could be forced to take greater steps to combat money laundering under new guidelines released on Thursday by the Financial Action Task Force, an international body that coordinates government policy on illicit finance. From a report: The task force called on governments to broaden regulatory oversight of crypto firms and force more of them to take measures such as checking the identities of their customers and reporting suspicious transactions to regulators. The FATF's guidelines don't have the force of law, and would need to be implemented by national regulators in each country. Still, the Paris-based group is influential in setting standards for government policies against money laundering and financing of terrorism, and its guidelines could shape new crypto regulations around the world. More than three dozen countries are FATF members, including the U.S., China and much of Europe. Representatives of the crypto industry criticized the guidelines, saying they would undermine privacy, stifle innovation or simply not work in the context of blockchain and digital-asset technology. "It would be inappropriate for anything like these non-specific and confusing standards to replace the current law and regulations we have on the books here in the U.S.," Peter Van Valkenburgh, research director at crypto advocacy group Coin Center, wrote in a blog post on Thursday. Among the targets of the FATF's guidelines is decentralized finance, or DeFi for short. DeFi is an umbrella term for various efforts to implement traditional financial activities -- such as lending or trading -- using software rather than a central intermediary to oversee transactions. DeFi has grown rapidly since last year, with over $100 billion of assets posted as collateral in various DeFi projects, according to data provider DeBank. The guidelines take aim at DeFi projects such as decentralized exchanges, in which crypto traders can swap assets with each other, typically on an anonymous basis. The task force said the people or companies that own or operate such decentralized platforms could be considered virtual asset service providers, or VASPs, a designation that would force them to check users' identities and take other measures against money laundering.Read more of this story at Slashdot.